Erin Brady
Erin Brady
PhD Candidate, University of Rochester
I'm a second-year PhD student in the Computer Science Department at the University of Rochester in Rochester, NY. I work in the Human-Computer Interaction group with my advisor Jeff Bigham.
Twitter: @erinleebrady
Email: brady at cs dot rochester
Office Number: 615
Research Interests:
My research interest are mainly within the field of accessibility, and using the power of a "crowd" of human workers to enable all users to utilize technology to the fullest possible extent.
Research Projects:
VizWiz Social: This project is an extention to VizWiz, a nearly-realtime question answering service for blind users. The original project allows users to photograph their surroundings with a mobile phone, ask a question about the photograph, and receive answers from anonymous workers within seconds. The new iteration will allow users to post questions to members of their social networks, in order to determine some of the factors that affect where they direct their queries -specifically looking at privacy, financial and social costs, and time.
Publications:
  • (poster) Brady, E. Analyzing Visual Questions for Visually Impaired Users. In Proceedings of the the 13th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers & Accessibility (ASSETS 2011), Dundee, Scotland, 2011. (link coming)
  • (position paper) Bigham, J. P., Brady, E. and White, S. Human-Backed Access Technology. In Proceedings of the CHI 2011 Workshop on Crowdsourcing and Human Computation. Vancouver, BC, 2011. Available from the website for the Crowdsourcing and Human Computation workshop.
Teaching:
Without warning, she asked me, "Hey, Watanabe, can you explain the difference between the English subjunctive present and the subjunctive past?"
"I think I can," I said.
"Let me ask you, then, what purpose does stuff like that serve in daily life?"
"None at all," I said. "It may not serve any concrete purpose, but it does give you some kind of training to help you grasp things in general more systematically."
Midori took a moment to give that some serious thought. "You're amazing," she said. "That never occurred to me before. I always thought of things like the subjunctive case and differential calculus and chemical symbols as totally useless. A pain in the neck. So I've always ignored them. Now I have to wonder if my whole life has been a mistake."

-- Norwegian Wood, Haruki Murakami